


Michael (and Jeremy) In The Bathroom

by atlas_of_galaxies



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, M/M, it's not gay if it's in the bathroom, just some friendly drunk kissing between two dudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 22:56:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11068809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlas_of_galaxies/pseuds/atlas_of_galaxies
Summary: There's nothing quite like a friendly makeout session with your ex-best friend to lighten the mood in the bathroom at the biggest party of the fall, right?





	Michael (and Jeremy) In The Bathroom

Jeremy's palms shake on the wood of the door as he slams it shut behind him. He can't turn the lock fast enough, and for a brief, blissful moment, the click of the bolt blocks out Jake's furious yells from outside his pristine sanctuary.

He stands there, awkwardly braced against the door, half-trying to barricade it, half-trying to remain upright. He drank so much that he's not entirely sure he'll even be able to survive if Jake decides to ram down the tender wood.

But after a few beats, his possible assailant falls quiet, and soon, all Jeremy can hear through the thin door is the chatter of his fellow party-goers.

He lets out a shuddering sigh and leans against the lumber that separates him from the outside world. His legs are too shaky to support him for long, and he quickly slips onto the floor. His sneakers squeak against the bathroom tile, echoing around the tiny room that's only outfitted with a toilet, a bathtub, a sink, and an adjoining water-stained mirror.

The teen blinks blearily at his surroundings, the tiles blurring together in his inebriated state.

Maybe he'll just ... sit in here until his eyes stop blending everything into bleached watercolors.

So he remains there, awkwardly slouched against the wall, his mind quieter than he remembers it being in a long time. Jeremy's not entirely sure if his Squip would have made that mess of a makeout session upstairs any better, so maybe it's for the best that the voice in his head is, for once, voiceless. It seems to calm his headache faster, at any rate.

After a few minutes of trying to remain as still as possible, he's able to make out distinguishable shapes around him. His eyes quickly zero in on a lifeboat in the sea of white threatening to drown him: the bathtub.

He forces himself onto his feet (and by feet he means knees and some help from his hands) and drunkenly stumbles over to the tub. He can't wait to just flop into it, curl up into an exhausted ball, and sleep for about 47 years, or however long it will take for him to get over his impending hangover.

However, instead of finding an empty bathtub, blessedly clean and open for real estate, he finds his former (?) best friend, Michael Mell.

Jeremy can't help it. He screams.

Not because he's scared to see Michael, no. It's more because of the fact that Jeremy had assumed that the bathroom was empty (and, had it been occupied, the person inside would have had the decency to alert him to their presence), only to find that his best friend that he didn't even think was going to show up to this party is suddenly sitting in the spot that he was looking forward to just moments ago.

Michael's greeting must have been drowned out in his yell, since he stares at his intoxicated friend dubiously, his mouth half-open and his right hand on a journey towards becoming a wave. "...Hello to you, too," he finally speaks, a thick eyebrow cocked, likely annoyed at having to repeat himself.

"Michael?" is all that Jeremy manages, who is now on the floor from his scare. Said teen sits up in the bathtub, propping himself up with his elbow along its side. He has his signature headphones hanging around his neck, but he wears a comfy dark sweater that reads 'CREEPS'. The dark-skinned boy looks down at him, his eyes slightly narrowing as they meet Jeremy's. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his straight nose and waits for him to continue.

"Squip got your tongue?" he prompts him. His expression is annoyed, maybe even angry, but Jeremy can tell from the unsteadiness of his dark gaze that he isn't exactly sober, either.

"No, it's ..." the Squipped teen unconsciously raises a hand to his head, smoothing his hair back as if looking for an ON switch. "...It's off. Alcohol inhibits it, I think."

"That explains why you're talking to me." Michael's gaze shifts away, staring at his feet in the bathtub. His Player One isn't really sure how to respond to that.

The boy in the bathtub apparently doesn't expect him to, though, since he leans over for a moment to grab something at the bottom of the tub. He reemerges with an unopened bottle of beer. He cracks open a cold one and downs it, only coming up for breath after getting about halfway through it. Jeremy stares at him in a mixture of awe and envy.

Michael must see it in his unfocused eyes, since he fishes another unopened bottle from his seemingly unending supply of beer and begrudgingly offers it to him. Jeremy receives it with a mumbled "Thanks" after a beat, but not before peaking over the edge of the bathtub and seeing that Michael has approximately 7 more bottles at the foot of the tub, about half of them still unopened.

"Damn," Jeremy exhales, leaning back on his haunches. He opens his beer with a little difficulty, but he takes a long swig from it before he can think about his decisions and about how drunk he already is. "You're like, prepared for the apocalypse in here. I mean, if all you needed for the end of the world was beer." The teen blinks and thinks over his words for a moment. "...That rhymed. Cool." He takes another sip of the alcohol in his hands.

His Player Two gazes at him for a few seconds more before finishing his bottle and moving onto a second. Or whatever number he's onto now. "You haven't acted that geeky in ages," he mumbles into the neck of his glass. Jeremy's not even sure he intended for him to hear.

Hear. Heere.

Heheh.

...

God. He's really drunk.

"Yeah, my Squip usually takes care of that for me," he explains in a slurred voice, just barely managing to suppress a hiccup. "Haven't been a nerd for uh ... couple years now."

Michael shoots him as ferocious of a glare as he can muster from within his fortress of the bathtub. "You got your Squip two months ago," he points out, his lips raised slightly in a sneer.

"I did?" If Michael didn't know him better (and if he wasn't as impaired), he would have slapped Jeremy across the face that blurted out his stupid, dumb answer. Instead, the sweater-clad teen takes an angry swig from his bottle. He's shaking so hard he feels like the glass is gonna shatter in his grip and spill shards and alcohol all over his body.

When he returns his gaze to Jeremy, the teen is staring at his own bottle like it's whispering to him secrets of the void. His lips are slightly parted, and his nose and cheeks are reddened from the alcohol. He almost looks like he's blushing.

Normally, when Jeremy gets this drunk - to the point of being kinda clueless but still endearing - Michael finds it ridiculously cute.

But now?

He's just fucking pissed.

"You're pathetic." The words escape his lips before Michael even thinks them. But as he feels them vibrate around his skull, he realizes that, yeah, Jeremy's pathetic. A pathetic mess.

He glances over at his former (definitely former now) best friend to gauge his reaction. He's not sure what he's hoping to find - maybe tears streaming down his face, maybe anger, whatever - but it's definitely not what's on Jeremy's face when he looks at him.

A look of pure and utter bewilderment possesses the teen's face. He stares at Michael, the rim of his glass brushing his lips.

Fuck, stop looking at his lips.

In order to distract himself from Jeremy's soft, incredibly kissable lips, Michael launches into a rant that he didn't realize he had building inside himself.

His breath catches as he pitches forward, staring Jeremy dead in his drunk, uneven eyes. "I've been waiting for this moment f-for _ages,_ just thinking about the moment we'd run into each other and you'd finally stop ignoring me so I could give you a piece of my mind and just, _let loose._ Do you have _any idea_ how lonely I was for those two months? Or how it felt when I realized that you were ignoring me? Do you have _any_ idea??" He glares drunken daggers at the object of his aggression.

Jeremy doesn't say anything; he only looks shocked. Michael thinks he prefers it that way, since he can keep going.

"No, of course you don't," the bitter, headphone-wearing teen answers for him. "You've been too busy locked away in your perfect make-believe world to think about how your actions are affecting everyone else around you." He suddenly lets out a humorless laugh. "You know, I wish that you _had_ bought a $400 Wintergreen Tic Tac, 'cause then at least none of this would have happened!" At 'this', he throws his arms out, gesturing to the entirety of the bathroom. In his frenzy, his beer bottle that he had rested upon the lip of the bathtub gets knocked over; it clatters to the ground, but it doesn't break.

"But you know what the worst part is?" he snarls, pure, emotional fury dripping into his voice as he pours out everything he's been bottling up inside for weeks. "The worst part? Is that even though you're here, and you can see me and hear me, you're not ... really here!!" His voice cracks, he feels his glasses slipping down his nose, but Michael doesn't care. "I wanted to confront you when you had the Squip by your side, to show how much you hurt me, but .. !!"

He suddenly lets out an anguished cry. The inebriated teen slumped before him on the ground startles, but he doesn't move away.

"But you're so ... pathetic!! This doesn't feel right! I need you to defend yourself! Tell me why you ignored me!" He's getting desperate, gripping the edge of the tub with whitened knuckles. "I can't just pour out my soul to a drunk man who can't even sit up straight!"

Unable to keep himself contained anymore, Michael clambers over the side of the bathtub, hearing the disturbed beer bottles left behind roll around the bottom of the tub with several loud _chinks._ He grips Jeremy's shirt and yanks him toward him, hoping to make him feel, if even just a little bit, the same anguish he went through at his so-called best friend's expense.

Yet Jeremy isn't quite as far gone as he thinks, since he grips Michael's hands and attempts to pry them off of him. His sneakers scramble against the smooth tile, but they find no purchase.

Finally, the intoxicated boy in his grasp gives up his fight, and he just stares at his former best friend, his face a few inches away from his. His body feels limp in Michael's grip, and he sort of silently accepts whatever fate the boy has in store for him.

Jeremy feels a puff of hot air as Michael exhales roughly onto his face, his lips still parted. He smells of beer; but, on second thought, both of them do.

Michael doesn't loosen his grip on the other's shirt, but he's still heavily aware of how close they are. He's practically straddling Jeremy's lap--

They stare directly at each other; even the alcohol is powerless to shake their gaze. Wide, light blue eyes watch in fear as the other's dark brown eyes narrow in turn.

Michael lets out a small, shaky sigh that Jeremy feels every little movement of. "I hate you, Jeremy," Player Two murmurs softly in his ear.

Then their lips connect.

Michael isn't terribly sure why he decides to close the gap of the last few inches between the two of them - maybe it's the fact that the boy he's been crushing on for over half a decade has his lips parted mere centimeters away, or the fact that he's extremely emotionally vulnerable at the moment and there's nothing quite like a friendly makeout session with your ex-best friend to lighten the mood, or maybe it's just the beers.

It's probably all three reasons, if he's being truthful.

When he finally realizes what he's just done, Michael closes his eyes and just focuses on the taste of Jeremy's lips on his. His Player One barely moves in his arms, and the dark-skinned boy briefly wonders if it's possible that he passed out.

But when Michael draws away for a beat to regain his breath, he finds Jeremy refusing to let him go and pressing back into him. Shocked, the taller teen gasps into his mouth, but the shorter quickly responds by starting to suck on his bottom lip.

Michael's so startled that he reflexively lets go of Jeremy's shirt; the boy sort of slumps against his partner, but he compensates by wrapping his arms around the back of his head to bring his lips closer. Michael does the same, and the two are soon locked in a tender embrace with their kiss in the middle.

The bathroom is quiet except for the faint murmur of the party right outside the door and the soft gasps the two of them occasionally let out. Their touch was hesitant at first, but now that the two drunk boys have let go of all inhibitions, they lean into each other, yearning for more.

Michael ends up being a little more pushy than he intended, and as he presses into Jeremy, his Player One has to remove his arms from their grasp around his partner and steadies himself upon the floor with the palms of his hands.

Unfortunately, Jeremy's kinda sweaty palms slip upon the smooth tile of the bathroom, and his arms give way beneath him, leading to Michael sorta falling on top of him.

Their kiss briefly breaks apart for the two to laugh into each other's mouths, realizing how silly they look. Jeremy takes a moment to catch his breath and examine Michael's face from across the tiny gap between them.

His dark skin is sliced through by the dazzling white of his smile, the mole under his nose partially hidden by his top lip. His dark eyes, filled with so much anger and hatred before, are now glittering with exhilaration. His glasses have slipped down his nose in their passion; Michael decides to just toss them aside to save him the trouble of having to continuously push them back up. The boy's hair is tussled and messy, contributing to a sort of "I woke up like this" look.

God, why didn't Jeremy see how fucking adorable his best friend is before this moment?

Or maybe it's just the alcohol speaking.

Either way, he doesn't care. He's still a little turned on from his encounter with Chloe, except now, he's so far gone and Michael looks so good that he doesn't care that he's making out with his best friend instead of Christine.

He'll get Christine when he sobers up and his Squip turns back on.

But for now, it's just Jeremy and Michael in the bathroom, and the Squip is nowhere to be heard.

The boy on the floor drapes his arms across Michael's shoulders and tangle his fingers in his curly hair. The sweater-clad teen on top dips back into a kiss, but he misses and sloppily smooches the side of his mouth instead. He tries to pull away, and his long nose collides with Jeremy's little ski-slope one. The two drunkenly giggle for a moment before reuniting their lips together.

It isn't long before Michael starts to regret the words he uttered mere seconds before this whole mess started. He doesn't hate Jeremy; both of them can tell that from the passion with which he embraces his Player One. No, it's much more obvious that Michael's been in love with him since elementary school.

He's been dreaming of kissing his stupidly cute best friend for years, of holding him with the intentions of more than a friend. Every moment since Jeremy developed his crush on Christine has been hell, every moment knowing that his favorite person loved someone else has skewered him through the heart every time like a continuous, merciless wave of pain.

But now, Christine feels as far away as the magical world Jeremy seems to believe she's from. Michael has Jeremy all to himself.

The words slip out into the air shared within their mouths. "I love you," Michael murmurs, closing his eyes. Jeremy feels the vibration of the words in his head more than he hears them. His lips tingling, Player One presses back into the kiss, a wide, drunk smile taking up half his face.

Michael feels a weird, freezing sensation seize the small of his back when he realizes that Jeremy remains silent in response to his confession. He's embracing and caressing him with all the care of a drunken lover, but when you take the whole situation in context, that's all that the Squipped teen is: drunk.

He's kissing the first thing in sight that offered him alcohol; that thing just happens to be his best friend of 12 years who's had a crush on him for well over half of that time.

The icy feeling freezing his backbone spreads across Michael's body like frostbite. Jeremy's touch, where his hands weave into his messy hair and stroke the sides of his face, feels distant and numb.

His Player Two doesn't react as Jeremy leans forward and starts peppering his partner's face with sloppy kisses, softly laughing as he does, as if this is all a joke, all a game.

Michael's hands fall to the floor, abandoning their post around the other boy's shoulders. Jeremy seems unfazed and just keeps on having a good time, making out with his best friend's largely immobile face.

As the teen returns his lips to Michael's, something wet suddenly splashes his cheek. Jeremy immediately startles, his eyes snapping open from his state of ecstasy. He breaks apart their kiss, staring up at his friend in wonder.

Michael is crying.

It's the silent kind of tears, the kind that's eerily absent of any accompanying sobs or shaking shoulders. He just remains there, crouching over Jeremy, his entire body numb and his face expressionless.

The tears fall hot and heavy onto his best friend's face, but neither makes a move.

"...Michael?" the teen finally asks, his hoarse voice filling the void of silence in the bathroom. He removes his hands from his friend's hair and extends one towards his face, to wipe his tears--

But Michael bats his hand away. He sits up, rubbing his face with his own hand to clear it of his pain. He's still sorta straddling Jeremy, but he's never felt more distant from him than he has in this moment.

The dark-skinned boy stares down at him, the tears still streaming down his cheeks despite his best efforts to erase the evidence. His dark gaze is as frigid as his limbs feel.

"Michael?" the other boy repeats his name, propping himself upon the bathroom floor with his elbows. He looks confused, his brows creased. There's a pain in his expression that cuts Michael to his core despite his numbness.

Without a word, his Player Two crawls off of him and retrieves his glasses from their resting place on the ground a few feet away. He dries his face with a towel before putting them on, pathetically sniffling as he does.

Now that he can properly see, he turns back to Jeremy, who still remains upon the floor in his drunken, horny state. He peers up at his friend, his gaze unsteady. His hair is sticking up all over the place, with strands of it sticking to his sweaty skin. He's a mess.

And yet he still stares up at his former best friend, unmoving, waiting for him to make a move.

The teen on his feet feels an awful, heavy pit settle in his stomach. Disgust lingers in his gaze as he watches Jeremy on the tile of the bathroom floor.

His sneakers squeak as he steps over the teen, making his way to the door. Jeremy jumps when he realizes what Michael is doing, and he scrambles to his hands and knees, trying to ignore the dizzying way the world is tilting. "Michael, wait!" he blurts, his voice ringing out clear as day in the silent room. "Where are you going?"

His Player Two pauses on his way out, his fingers hovering over the handle and his stride frozen at the heel. He throws a scalding look back at the intoxicated boy half-off the tile. Jeremy's never seen so much anger and hatred in Michael's eyes ever before.

"Good-bye, Jeremy." His tone makes the room ten degrees colder.

Then he undoes the lock, presses down the handle, and Michael Mell is out the door.

Jeremy stares after him, speechless. A hand wanders to his lips, which still taste of beer and Michael. He's not really sure what just happened.

First he thought Michael was at least neutral about seeing him, then he was furious, then he was making out with him in a passion on the tile --

\-- His fingers still tingle where they traced his best friend's cheekbones --

And then he started crying and now he's gone.

Is all of this ... _his_ fault?

Jeremy ponders over this for a moment. His Squip is still muddled by the alcohol that must make up 50% of his blood by now, so his mind is quiet; at least, it should be. Instead, he's just asking himself a thousand questions _why_ \--

\-- why did his best friend make out with him --

\-- why did he allow said making out to occur --

\-- why did he enjoy said making out --

\-- why the fuck did he drink so much --

His thoughts suddenly vanish like mist in sunlight when he hears a heavy knocking on the door.

The Squipped teen freezes up. For a brief, fluttering moment, he thinks that Michael has returned to him, to explain what the hell just happened, to pass off all that kissing as a practical joke, to tell him that he isn't in love with him, just very drunk and very, very horny.

Instead, he hears a stranger's voice from beyond the wood. "Hey, are you done in there yet?" It's unfamiliar, so at least he doesn't have to worry about Jake ambushing him right outside the door.

"Yeah, I'll be out in a second," he calls back. He feels his mouth forming words without his consent. Jeremy takes another quick look around the bathroom; you can't even tell that Michael was even in here a few minutes ago, save for the hoard of beer bottles, both empty and full, at the floor of the bathtub.

He blinks down at them, his vision partially swimming from all the booze in his system.

Coming to a decision with a shrug, Jeremy ducks down to snatch another unopened one before quietly slipping out the bathroom door.

 


End file.
